The Generative Role of Settlement Aggregation and Urbanization

: I describe a new approach to understanding processes of village aggregation and urbanization in the past. The key concept—energized crowding—refers to the social effects of large numbers of social interactions that take place within settlements. Demographic processes of population growth and settlement nucleation (aggregation and urbanization) lead to increased energized crowding, which in turn generates a variety of social outcomes. I discuss those outcomes under three headings: scalar stress, community formation, and economic growth. In this model, aggregation and urbanization are crucial processes that lead—by way of energized crowding—to many documented social outputs in both contemporary and past settlement systems. Because this is a new approach for archaeology, conceptual tools for understanding these processes must be borrowed from other social sciences. In particular, recent research on settlement scaling provides empirical and theoretical support for the notion that aggregation and urbanization were of fundamental importance in generating social change in the past.